You know you’ve outgrown tumblr when you have no idea what this business with the booping is

A rambling diatribe on retro-gaming elitism

There’s a lot to be annoyed about in the world today - obviously - especially with the various types of mess we’re all living with in every country in the world.

But a particular, and specific annoyance in the retrogaming hobby/lifestyle/environment/zeitgeist, is the hive-mind attitude from an increasing number of the most vocal (and seemingly most affluent) participants that this is, or should be, an extremely expensive hobby/lifestyle/etc/etc.

It’s impossible not to notice an underlying, deeply unpleasant, atmosphere of elitism in many of the communities I visit. An attitude of ‘you’re not doing it right’ directed at anyone who doesn’t have their Neo Geo AES hooked up to a 20” PVM via OSSC. (I have no idea if that example makes sense, nor do I care.)

This is the kind of arms-race attitude that fought to keep PC gaming an exclusive club for decades, and it has gradually seeped into retro gaming's language and ecosystem almost undetected.

The simple joy of rekindling one's nostalgia for Super Mario World, or re-experiencing the simple fun of games lost with the arcades, is being obfuscated by a collective need to quantify, update, and monetise every aspect of vintage computer entertainment.

It’s the kind of environment where you might expect the gateway drug of emulation to be met with the utmost scorn, but instead the self appointed guardians of retro (You can have that for your quiz team/band name, BTW) have positioned emulation behind a paywall of Retron 5s, Mega SGs, and (only the latest and most expensive) Everdrives. Any excited newcomer asking about the best controller to play retro games on their laptop is quickly overwhelmed with talks of latency, resolutions, and refresh rates.

If it wasn’t bad enough that forced exclusivity exists, it actually appears to be having it’s desired effect.

You can see it both in the way questions are asked and in the tone of the responses. You can see it in the photos of someones latest, expensive, haul and the other even more expensive stuff in the background - almost, but not quite, out of focus.

People don’t ask where they can find a cheap CRT, they ask if their $100 Trinitron is ‘good enough’. A joyous celebration of a bargain buy, or a long lost attic discovery, will be met with derision and disbelief, the underlying accusation that unless you can afford the inflated eBay prices for a barely average Sega Saturn game, then you aren’t worthy to own it.

Which brings me neatly to the event that triggered this rambling blog entry.

There was someone on a Discord server I’ve been frequenting who stated, blankly, without malice, that “all the good Saturn games are 100+ dollars”.

Why would they think this? Simply because it’s what the gatekeepers want them, you, and everyone else to think.

These are the people who, when a collective question is asked, wouldn’t dream of recommending any of the dozens of fantastic, better even, Saturn games you could buy for the price of Burning Rangers.

It’s this sub-group who don’t want you enjoying Sonic the Hedgehog for free when they’ve invested $200 in a Mega SG. The only way their post-purchase rationalisation can cope is by attacking the perceived difference in quality, by claiming they seek a ‘purer’ experience, and by attempting to undermine the simple pleasure of just playing old games by insinuating that someone with a secondhand NES Mini isn’t doing it right.

Now I just want to be clear that I’m not claiming to be some kind of saint who never judges anyone else's choices, nor am I saying that there aren’t benefits to some modern retro products, but the weaponised affluence I’m seeing increasingly around retro gaming communities is something else entirely.

Admission 1: I strongly believe that by downloading a thousand roms and picking one to play for five minutes before switching to another, then another, then another... your assessment of them will lack a psychological bond of choice, expectation, and - yes - sometimes investment that adds to the whole experience of a game.

But this is no less true of a pack of illegal roms than it is of someone with thousands in disposable income spending a tenth of that on a game they’ll probably never play.

Cost, value, and investment are relative terms. The kind of ‘bond’ I’m trying to describe between a player and a game can be gained through the investment of time, the effort of research, and the expectation of finding out for oneself if that game from your childhood holds up 20 years later.

Admission 2: I think games from the previous century should be played on a CRT television whenever possible. Pixels look better with real scanlines - it’s an incontrovertible fact - and the colour depth offered by that massive, humming monstrosity wedged into the corner is really something lost to the ages.

But it’s not a prerequisite of fun. And it’s especially not necessary to find the most expensive, most instagrammable, most egregiously hyped PVM to enjoy a game of Super Mariokart with your kids.

When I say: "I think these games should be played on a CRT", I mean ANY CRT. I’m typing this in a room with 6 of the things, two of them were free, and the whole collection has been compiled for the total cash investment of £26.

As someone born over 4 decades ago I’ll let you into a secret: The geometry has always been rubbish, the hum has always been loud, the picture has always flickered and no one ever cared about resolution or refresh rate or input lag when playing Tornado Low Level on their ZX Spectrum in 1984.

It’s entirely possible to argue a convincing case that you’ll get a more enjoyable retro experience from a wonky Bush portable TV than from any professional quality display equipment. And beyond that, if you can’t find a tube telly or don’t have room for one, use an LCD - it’s better than nothing, and the filters some emulators have these days are great.

It comes down this:

If you’re lucky enough, or have worked hard enough, to have the disposable income necessary to buy $400 RGB Scart cables and a professional monitor the size of a family car - and that’s genuinely what you want for your retro gaming experience - That’s cool. You don’t need anyone's approval or respect, you’re doing what you want to do the way you want to do it - and that’s a life lesson for everyone right there. But it’s your way, and nothing more than that.

This nonsense of idolising only the most expensive elements of this hobby has to change and we, the members of these communities, are the only people in a place to do that.

So the next time you see an excited new Dreamcast owner looking for game suggestions, mention the best ones first, not the most expensive.

When you come across a reddit picture of someone's game collection don’t immediately look for the over-priced ‘rare’ game they haven’t got, look for the ones you have in common and can have a conversation about.

And if you ever, ever, see someone being criticised for playing roms, or using composite cables, or playing on a flat screen TV, or any of that postering gibberish - step into that conversation and ask what games they love? What happy memories do they have? What is it about retro games brings them joy?

Because this is the real value of games.

They bring us experiences and memories to savour forever, they engage with us in a different way to that of films and music - and that difference should be cherished.

Games exist to bring us pleasure. Sometimes that pleasure is tinged with fear, and sometimes it’s truly dark and doesn’t feel like pleasure at all. Sometimes the pleasure comes from intellectual stimulation, sometimes from mindless entertainment.

But whatever form it takes, this pleasure, this… fun… cannot be tempered by technology, and it must never be attributed to any scale of monetary investment.

The simplicity of Retro Games is joyous, they are heartbreaking, they are brilliant and they must never be withheld from those who measure value in the size of their smile, by those who measure it in the size of their wallet.

You better get the aspect ratio right though, or I will hunt you down!

Old Blogs

5/11/20If I was pressed, truly reamed and grilled, for the location of where the last five days went, I would not be able to produce a satisfactory answer. It seems like they just flew by with neither rhyme nor reason.What I’ve been thinking about during these past five days wouldn’t fit in a blog post, but I can highlight one central topic: world building. I’ve been trying to write three novels this year. I often get asked if it’s difficult to keep the worlds separate from one another. I usually answer with a “It’s really not that difficult” or segue into a cute anecdote about my dog, since most people aren’t interested in an actual answer. To those prepared to listen, I hand them a “yes and no.”No, it’s not as hard as it seems because I use one to escape the others. The worlds must be different, unique, and distinctive because any bleeding through wouldn’t offer me the complete new reality I crave when I am struck with writer’s block. I try to think of it as preparing for a triathlon. Sure, you use similar muscle groups to run, bike, and swim, but you don’t show up to the pool in track cleats because the detail would be identified as alien immediately.Yes, it is hard because the same overarching themes will appear as they will in an work of mortals. What kind of story would it be if there isn’t a struggle of good and evil? Would it be listed with the best sellers if there wasn’t an endearing mentor who gets killed at the beginning of the adventure? Oh? Too far? Even so, the themes that have defined my life will more than likely pop up in more than one of my books. I will have to work then even harder on my characters and their environments.These considerations are important to my approach to world building. I must carefully paint with three different pallets the physical attributes of each of my worlds. I must be cautious of what the careful reader might notice. I do not reuse sets or scripts. Still, as I compose three separate works, the ideas I believe in will show up in these different colors. I am only one writer with one perception of reality. I am extremely limited in my quest to entertain masses. All I can do is work and revise and work again, and hope that there are other people willing to step into my shoes.Personally, not a lot has been going on. Today was the first day in I don’t know how long that I did all the hygiene an average person would do in one day. I’ve started bullet journaling again and texted my goals to my best friend so I have accountability. My project right now is to make looking and feeling good my job for one month. My personal hygiene has become so neglected as I have sunk deeper and deeper into my depression. The other day, I just woke up with the motivation to turn that part of my life around.I know it’s only been one day, but it’s been so long since I actually achieved something in this area and I’ve been so sad that I thought I should celebrate this step.I’m so tired, but I wanted to get one more thing checked off my list tonight before I go to sleep.Sometimes I wonder if it’s time to learn another language. I feel like most people my age have at least two languages under their belt where I have just the one. I want to be considered bright and I feel like this is the next step.Here is the point again where I consider sleep less important than the things I could be doing instead of sleeping. Where is this little voice coming from? What is so dark inside us that wants us to fail? How can you ride a ship you’re preparing to sink? Is it fear that wants to personify it? Make it a separate entity so I can’t be to blame for my own bad habits? Who knows.I’m beginning to enjoy television, which is sort of new for me. I wonder if it means my attention span has finally reached null. Sure, there have been very well done productions I’ve been a fanatic for in the past, but I’ve never been able to turn on a random show and just enjoy. I’ve almost finished watching all the Storage Wars available on Netflix. I never thought I’d be the kind of person that turns to reality television, but here we are. Maybe this is how quarantine truly breaks me. If I don’t have focus, I don’t have anything. I’m beginning to nod off. I really want to reach a thousand words before I go to sleep. That means no editing whatsoever, just stream of consciousness. It’s been feeling more like a dry creek bed lately. I could stare at the ceiling for hours. I could sleep all day and not be bored. I know that’s concerning. I’ve already made an appointment with my doctor about switching my medications. I just want to feel like I did when I was in second grade, seventh grade, ninth grade. There is so much left for me to do here that it feels overwhelming.Nearly there. That gibberish sure helped. Take this as an example, kind reader, of what I usually cut out for your benefit and mine. It’s okay, I know no one is reading this. I just need to allow the chance for someone to hear what the people in my life can’t hear for themselves. I’m so scared of being a burden that I don’t know how to open up to people I meet in real life. It’s either I don’t want them to know my middle name to “What’s your mother like and how did that affect your psychological development?” That’s it, thanks.

5/6/20

Alas, another day has passed and! I’m still depressed. How did that happen? Did I make zero changes and expect something to happen? Maybe. But I did wish for it really really hard. (I know, in THIS economy??)

Silliness and vague misdirection aside, today sucked. I spent the morning in a weird, unawake haze because I hadn’t slept. The afternoon dragged on as I crammed for my Modern Grammar which (and now here’s the real kicker) kicked me good in the pants. Lastly, I told my roommates that I plan on moving out and they did not take it well. All this contributed to a day ill spent.

I don’t know where my weird relationship with sleep came from. Logically, I know that I need sleep. I know that sleep will do me well and allow my body to get ready for another day. One day, a little voice crept into my mind and told me that sleep was optional. I haven’t been able to shut it off since. Need extra time to study? Want to get to the next level? Only another hour before your friend in another timezone wakes up? Might as well pull an all-nighter. Objects in motion, after all.

I’m also out of my sleeping medication. And I haven’t been taking my medication. I’m struggling and I’m lacking the discipline to push myself the extra mile to potentially getting better. I think what I need are some small victories. Already, I am writing. I am journaling. I am crossing small things off my list in a desperate attempt for dopamine. Desperate, yes, but shameful? Absolutely not. It feels like I’m running a marathon underwater, but I still intend to finish. It’s just going to take me a little longer.

At one point and time, I was filming taking my medication every day and posting a little mental check on Youtube. That was good, until I missed one day, and then three days, and now it’s been almost a month. I just feel so guilty over any reveal of failure or shortcoming. How am I supposed to come back from showing that I’m not perfect?

I don’t know if this needs to be said, but if I were talking to my friend in the same situation, I would reassure them 1000% that I would love them no matter what, especially through their imperfections. It’s not that I set the bar lower for my friends than I do for myself, but I am a lot harder on me when I don’t meet my expectations. I guess that comes with being a wild romantic, right? Reality is that blinding white light that pierces through daydream. The clear solution is to have more realistic daydreams, but those aren’t nearly as fun.

Small victories, eh? What goals can I set for myself?

It’s late. I should go to bed. Today was rough and on top of everything I’m dehydrated. I hate complainers and hypocrites. I shall bless your feed with another rambling posthaste, rest allowing.

5/5/20

I’m going to pretend I didn’t see the clock strike midnight and write this from the perspective of today, May the 5th. A good, round-numbered day to start something new. I’ve always been fond of round numbers. I’ve always been fond of clean slates.

My central problem in life right now is that I’m depressed. I don’t like myself. I don’t like what I do with my time. Everything seems pointless. I lack purpose, direction, inspiration. I love the world and find myself submerged in curiosity often enough, but I don’t apply myself towards meaningful goals. My lack of application is the root of my unhappiness. If I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t want to be friends with me. And that invokes a whole other can of worms; namely insecurity, impostor syndrome, and low standards. But I digress.

I. Want. To. Be. Happy. I want to feel like I am making progress. I don’t want to feel vaguely ill anymore. I don’t think I should have to live with boredom as my default emotion. I don’t want to have to repress anything anymore.

How can I be happy? Well, isn’t that the age-old question. If there was a simple, clear-cut answer, I would bottle it and become a billionaire. Instead of a product, though, I have the following goals.

In order to be happy, I need to take care of my body. I need to be kinder to the vessel through which I experience all happiness, through which I enact all acts of generosity. What will this look like? For one, I would like to have a “glow-up”. I would like to have a before and after photo-set that I can look at and be proud of. This will mean skincare, daily showering, healthy eating, and regular exercise. I can’t expect myself to be happy in an unkempt body.

I am going to execute this goal by applying a hygiene routine, researching daily workouts, and keeping track of what goes into my body. I will also take the time to do silly, frivolous things like put on eyeliner and curl my hair simply because it makes me happy. I will have a more coordinated plan by tomorrow. For now, I research.

In order to be happy, I need to take care of my brain. Practice makes perfect and no practice makes mush. I don’t want a pile of mush directing the rest of my life. I want a clean, sharp machine dictating my every move. I want the gears to shift as smoothly as a well-oiled watch. I want to feel as efficient as I did in high school, when I was taking college courses and researching off-curriculum subjects just to ease my questioning mind.

I am going to execute this goal by finishing my semester strong, spending dedicated time each day towards active learning, and planning monthly projects. I will also find ways to implement healthy curiosity in my daily conversations. I was a “why” child. Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why do we have ten fingers and ten toes but only two ears? Why? Why? Why? I want to transition back to that motivated, inquisitive mindset. As with taking care of my body, I will have a more decisive plan for this goal tomorrow.

In order to be happy, I need to take care of my soul. One of the biggest reasons I’ve been increasingly unhappy these past months (or even years, you could argue) is because I am simply not creating more than I am consuming. A great joy that is allowed us is pure creation. I am tired of sitting passively while muses give up on me, moving onto to the next open mind. I want to build up my patience for writer’s block, to give in to the urge to write badly rather than not write at all.

I am going to execute this goal by setting word counts for myself daily depending on my schedule, setting due dates for my projects, and holding myself accountable with creative partners. I know I have stories to tell, characters to illustrate, worlds to discover. I have always felt that within myself. “I contain multitudes.” There is opportunity here, if I am only willing to open the door. I’m a firm believer that nothing worth having comes without effort, but I’ve been sitting idly anyways. What hypocrisy.

Those are my main goals. This slate is no longer clean. I have marked it with intent.

I’ve always like clean slates because it feels better to start something new rather than digging yourself out of a hole of failure. Let me acknowledge, I am buried deep under years and years of bad habits and ill-fated mindsets. I have allowed myself to sink to this depth. It is no one’s fault but my own. I am not trying to say anything different that, nor will I ever attempt to blame someone other than myself for my circumstances. This has been my doing and my doing alone. So, when I say clean slate, you know that I know that there is no such thing as a clear state. I am merely marking a line in the sand to cross over and become a different person. Hopefully.

This has gone on for too long. I sent a goal of 1000 words per day. Initially, I was wondering if that would be enough, or if it would be too little. Would I be boring whoever came across my articles of dis-wisdom? Would I be leaving them without adequate information to ever bother reading something of mine again? We don’t really know the fate of our goals when we set them. We pin our hopes to them like ribbons, we shower them with expectations, but we can’t ever really know how things will turn out. I can’t say for certain that i will ever complete these goals, but I cannot let that discourage me. After all, this has been 1000 words.

Rediscovering the Lost Art of Travel

Posted: 5/16/2019 | May 16th, 2019

Seth Kugel is the former Frugal Traveler columnist for the New York Times and author of the new Rediscovering Travel: A Guide for the Globally Curious, from which this is adapted. I’ve known him for years and our travel philosophy dovetails a lot. I read his book last year and thought “If I were ever to write a book on the state of the travel industry, this is the book I would write!” It’s a great book and today, Seth excerpted part of the book for us!

Stenciled in white block letters on a dreary cement wall in Mezöberény, a tidy but fraying town of twelve thousand in the hyperbolically named Great Hungarian Plain, appeared the word:

SZESZFÖZDE

Hours earlier, in the overcast predawn hours of a nippy January day, I had stumbled off the Bucharest-to-Budapest train to see what it would be like to spend the weekend in the opposite of a tourist destination. Mezöberény was not just absent from guidebooks — it did not have a single restaurant, hotel, or activity listed on TripAdvisor, something that cannot be said for Mbabara, Uganda, or Dalanzadgad, Mongolia. I did have some info on the town, though, thanks to its municipal website: resident József Halász had recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday.

Or that’s what Google Translate told me. Hungarian is a Uralic language, more closely related to the output you might get falling asleep on a keyboard than to English or German or French. That makes even basic comprehension a challenge, as I found as soon as I rushed from the train to the station’s restrooms and faced the urgent need to choose between two doors: FÉRFI and NÖI. The authorities had apparently saved a few forints by not splurging on stick-figure signs.

The day had been born cold and gray and stayed that way as I walked through the town, slowly getting my bearings, intrigued by the pre-war, pre-Communist homes and the more than occasional bike rider — there were almost more bikes than cars — who waved hello. But then a winter drizzle took up, causing an abrupt decline in the number of cyclists even as the number of wandering American visitors held steady at one. To me, a travel day that turns rainy is like a piece of chocolate I’ve dropped on the floor: it’s significantly less appealing, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw it away.

It was in the first minutes of rain that I came across that stenciled sign on an otherwise residential street. Beyond the wall, down a cracking, now puddle-pocked driveway, were a dozen or so plastic barrels lined up like nuclear-waste drums. Beyond them, maybe a hundred feet from where I stood, was a one-story L-shaped building. What was this place? Well, SZESZFÖZDE, apparently. But what was that?

In the old days (say, 2009), I would have pulled out an English-Hungarian phrase book or pocket dictionary, but instead, I activated international roaming on my phone, carefully spelled out S-Z-E-S- Z-F-O-Z-D-E, and tapped Go.

The less-than-lightning speed of Great Hungarian Plain mobile service provided a dramatic pause. And then came my answer:

DISTILLERY.

You don’t say.

I would have guessed PRIVATE PROPERTY maybe, or DANGER—STAY OUT, or MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, YOU MEDDLING FOREIGNER! But a distillery? A wave of adrenaline washed down my torso as my lips curled into a dumb-luck smile.

Two rather gruff-looking men emerged from the door, the older one smoking a cigarette and wearing a sweater and work-stained trousers that suggested Warsaw Pact 1986 more than modern-day European Union. I waved to them, pointed to the bulky Canon 7D hanging from my neck, and then to the building. Old-school Google Translate.

They waved me in and gave me a tour.

Inside the ancient but fully functioning distillery, the men let me take pictures as they gave me a vaguely intelligible lesson via pointing, expressive looks, and smartphone-translated Hungarian, on how pálinka — Hungarian fruit brandy — was made.

Those barrels I had seen outside, it turned out, were full of fermenting pear and grape and apple juices. Inside, it was distilled somehow through a looping and tangled system of pipes running out of tin tanks up and along the walls. It looked like the laboratory of a mad scientist with a penchant for tacky linoleum flooring.

As they led me around, I engaged in that most intrinsic of travel activities: trying to see the world from the vantage point of someone utterly different from me. What was their life like? Had they traveled? Who were their parents and grandparents? The language barrier that did not allow them to answer did not stop me from wondering.

After soaking in every rusty detail and every glint of pride in the men’s tired eyes, I typed, “Come visit me in New York” into Google Translate — laughs all around — then headed back onto the drizzly streets of Mezöberény, utterly elated.

What was so great about this moment? Sure, the szeszfözde was a neat little story for friends, and in my case, worth a few paragraphs in the newspaper. But wasn’t it just a grimy business making local hooch in a town that even most Hungarians would classify as the middle of nowhere?

It was a great moment because I discovered it. Not an earth-shattering discovery in the sense of a cure for AIDS or a previously unknown species of poison-spitting neon frog the size of a pinky nail. But it was 100 percent unexpected, 100 percent real, and 100 percent mine.

Discovery used to be the lifeblood of travel, at least for those of us who shun tour-bus groups and all-inclusive resorts. We used to leave home knowing relatively little about our destination — perhaps with some highlighted guidebook pages denoting major attractions and local tipping etiquette, a list of tips culled from well-traveled friends, or articles copied and pasted into a Word document. For the ambitious, maybe a notional feel for the local history or culture gleaned pre-trip from a historical novel.

Beyond that, we were on our own.

Paper guidebooks frozen in time helped us along, as did pamphlets and paper maps from tourist information booths and tips from a hotel concierge. Earlier this century, Google searches in internet cafés also lent a hand. But otherwise, there was no choice: You decided what to do with your own eyes and ears, by wandering, by initiating human-to-human contact. Tips came from hearing fellow travelers’ stories over hostel or (non-Air) B&B breakfasts, entering a shop to ask directions and ending up in a conversation with the owner, or catching a whiff of fresh bread or sizzling chilies and following your nose.

Of course, all that still happens today — but only if you really go out of your way to make it happen. Not only is nearly every place in the world documented to within an inch of its life but that documentation — which comes dressed as both fact and opinion — is overwhelmingly and immediately available, thanks to pervasive technology. That’s great for many things in life — medical information, how-to videos, shorter commutes. But don’t we travel to break our routine? To experience the unexpected? To let the world delight us?

If we do, we have a funny way of showing it. We pore over online reviews for weeks, plan days down to the half hour, and then let GPS and the collected wisdom of the unwise lead us blindly. We mean well — no one wants to have a romantic dinner go wrong or to get lost and miss out on a “must-see attraction” or to risk chaos by failing to keep the kids entertained for three minutes.

But isn’t that just a digital version of the old-fashioned group tour? Well, almost, except that on the bus tour, you actually get to meet the person whose advice you’re taking.

One of my most ironclad rules of travel is this: the number of visitors a place receives is inversely related to how nice locals are to those visitors. Mezöberény, as far as I knew, had received precisely no foreign tourists ever. It was the anti-Paris, and this distillery the anti-Louvre.

People who inhabit the still-plentiful tourist-free swaths of the planet tend to be not only just nicer but more curious. They say a bear in the wild is just as scared of you as you are of it. I say people in places where outsiders rarely go are just as curious about visitors as visitors are about them. The question is not why the distillery workers invited me — a camera-toting, gibberish-talking stranger — in for a tour, it’s why wouldn’t they? If it were me, I’d be thinking: “What is this odd foreigner doing outside our szeszfözde with a camera? Wait till I tell the kids! And by the way, isn’t it about time we took a break?”

More importantly, is it possible that stumbling upon a dank distillery might be just as thrilling as a tour of one of the world’s great monuments? Did the surge of emotion I felt when the word distillery popped onto my screen match what I felt when I first glanced up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Probably not, although I remember the distillery moment quite precisely and barely recall what I felt at the Sistine Chapel. Why? Because although Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls and biblical re-creations are several trillion times lovelier than rusty pipes in a concrete building reeking of fermented fruit, I had seen them before in photos, heard professors talk about them, and read other travelers’ accounts as I sought the best times to avoid crowds.

That’s why I believe it is time we rediscover travel and recognize the value of what an overdocumented world has taken away: the delight of making things happen on your own.

***

Seth is the former Frugal Traveler columnist for the New York Times and author of the new Rediscovering Travel: A Guide for the Globally Curious, from which this is adapted.

In this book, Kugel challenges the modern travel industry with a determination to reignite humanity’s age-old sense of adventure that has virtually been vanquished in this spontaneity-obliterating digital age. You can purchase the book at Amazon and give it a read.

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